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November 11, 2020How to Create SEO Friendly Affiliate Links (in Three Steps)
Affiliate links are a useful tool for online advertisers looking to gain a little extra traffic.
Essentially, you’ll be putting a link to your website, or a landing page, on an affiliate’s website or domain.
You’ll receive the benefit of extra traffic in exchange for a small fee, usually a fixed amount per click-through.
If you’re familiar with Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you already know what affiliate marketing is like—traditional affiliate links work the same way, but with a site other than a major search engine.
Affiliate links can be tricky, however. Google is able to identify which links are designed for affiliate marketing, and traditionally, the search engine giant has held a firm stance that affiliate links are nofollow do not pass authority on to the destination site.
Affiliate links can be seen as endorsements, like a traditional backlink that offers a citation or a reference to an outside source, or advertisements, which are purchased and therefore do not pass any kind of authority.
Google views links as respectable, but they also see them as a form of advertising—so the rules of linking through affiliates are different if you’re trying to get the most out of your SEO campaign.
It’s impossible to get any authority to pass through your affiliate links directly, but there are a handful of techniques you can use to optimize new content and build more authority for your domain in general. There are three steps to this process.
Step One: Find Relevant Affiliates
Depending on your budget, you may have a limited range of options for potential affiliates. There are many popular options available, but if you’re interested in getting the most for your time and effort, it’s better to find one with relevance to your industry, or one with a high level of authority. Working with webmasters of low-authority article directories or similar shady schemes could cause your affiliate links to be seen as unscrupulous, or otherwise irrelevant. It’s true that these affiliate links do not pass authority, but if your webmaster posts the link incorrectly or if your link appears too frequently on the site, you could incur a penalty on your domain.
Secondly, you’ll want to find a webmaster who is easy to work with. Should anything change with your link or your campaign, you need to have a line of flexibility. Most respectable online domains will pose no problem for you, but run through your long-term options before finalizing any affiliate in your program.
Once you’ve found a suitable affiliate, you can start brainstorming about your links. Ideally, you’ll have a handful of different links to post for each affiliate site, so they can cycle through or add some diversity to the program. If you’re an e-commerce site, you can create different links for different products. Otherwise, you can create different naming conventions or different destinations based on your service offerings.
Step Two: Create a Landing Page
Next, you’ll want to create a unique landing page for each domain you have in your network of affiliates. For example, if you’re only working with one affiliate, you’ll only need to set up a landing page for that one, but if you’re working with three different webmasters, you’ll need three separate landing pages. This isn’t a requirement of affiliate marketing; instead, it’s a key opportunity to optimize your site for SEO, and improve your ability to track traffic and conversions.
The landing pages don’t need to be anything fancy, but they will need to be designed in a way that captures your inbound lead’s interest and gives them a chance to convert—whether that means purchasing a product or filling out a form. You’ll also need to make sure each landing page is set up under your core domain, with a unique and relevant URL associated with it. For example, if your domain is SEO.co, you could set up a trio of landing pages such as SEO.co/affiliate/affiliate-name-1, SEO.co/affiliate/affiliate-name-2, and SEO.co/affiliate/affiliate-name-3. Doing so will instantly give you three new pages of content on your domain, which will assist your onsite SEO efforts if you write them in line with SEO best practices.
As what might be an obvious piece of advice, make sure your landing pages are all uniquely written. Don’t simply change a handful of words around and hope that Google doesn’t catch you cutting corners; take the time to write each page from scratch if you want to avoid getting noticed for posting duplicate content. You could also use these landing pages to post inward links to your interior pages, giving you a tighter network of in-linking to enhance your navigation simplicity in the eyes of Google’s robots.
As an added bonus to the separate landing page structure, you’ll be able to set up individual goals in Google Analytics and attain valuable data about the nature of each inbound stream of traffic. If you’re dealing with multiple different affiliates, you probably already have an easy way to determine which is bringing you the most traffic—but with Goals, you’ll be able to see exactly how your users behave once they arrive to the landing pages, and which types of users are the most qualified as potential leads.
Step Three: Add Value to the Affiliate’s Site
Now that you’ve got your affiliates chosen and you have your landing pages set up, it’s time for the final step of the process: adding more value to your affiliate’s site. This is where the flexible relationship with your webmasters will come in handy.
If your webmaster is open to the option, offer additional content for them to post around your link. There’s a chance you’ll have to pay for this extra service, but in most cases, webmasters will appreciate the opportunity to feature extra content onsite. One of the best ways to do this is to feature an embedded video, showcasing your brand or the product you’re going to be selling through the affiliate link, near the source of the link. For webmasters, it serves as a bonus piece of content. For users, it serves as an interactive preview before they ever have to click a link. For you, it’s a key opportunity to improve your offsite SEO. Anybody sharing or linking to your embedded video will pass link juice all the way back to your original domain, giving you one extra push for search optimization.
Other options include posting similarly engaging pieces of visual content, such as infographics, or using short clips of copy to optimize for a product name or brand name. As with any SEO-related copy, you’ll want to take efforts to avoid over-optimizing with irrelevant or spammy keyword choices.
Bonus tip: Use redirects for your internal affiliate links
The links you place in articles published on other people’s websites should go directly to meaty content directly on your website. These are your affiliate program landing pages discussed earlier in this article. You should never publish links with a redirect on other people’s websites – they might not like redirects and they might be removed. However, when placing affiliate links on your own site, as internal links, best practice is to use custom links from your domain that redirect to your actual affiliate link. For example:
Say you’re selling a shampoo product. Your affiliate link might look something like this:
www.affiliatesite.com/amazingshampoo.html?ref=71625356
Instead of linking directly to your affiliate link, you’ll link to a shorter URL on your website, like this:
www.yoursite.com/shampoo
Then you’ll create a redirect from www.yourdomain.com/shampoo to your affiliate link.
There are several good reasons to use redirects for your internal affiliate links, although you could go either way. Using bare affiliate links on your website won’t hurt your SEO rankings. However, it could hurt your SEO in the long run in other ways.
Publishing bare affiliate links on your website is OK with Google
Google has no problem with webmasters using redirects for affiliate links. This practice is called “link cloaking.” And while some people choose not to make the effort to cloak their affiliate links, it’s actually better for you and better for your long-term SEO when you use this technique.
How link cloaking supports long-term SEO efforts
Since the purpose of SEO is to rank your web pages higher in the search engines to generate traffic that will click on your affiliate links, you can’t afford to have broken affiliate links on your site. If you spend time and money on SEO, but your affiliate links don’t’ work, your SEO efforts will have been for naught.
Unfortunately, affiliate links can become inactive without your knowledge. When these inactive links go unaddressed, all of your efforts to generate traffic, and every click you generate will be a waste because it won’t bring you any commissions.
How and why affiliate links become inactive
Imagine joining an affiliate program for a handful of different affiliate networks and building a successful online business with plenty of site visitors. You go to great lengths to create landing pages for your target audience and you use high-level marketing techniques to generate passive income. Maybe you make a few hundred bucks from each of your affiliate programs and you’re starting to feel like you’re building up a reliable source of income.
What would you do if any of your affiliate links became inactive? If your referral links stop working, all of your clicks will be for nothing. This can happen for a variety of reasons, like if an affiliate program drops you from their network, the company goes out of business, or if any of your affiliate partners change their product URLs without using redirects.
Without cloaked links, if any of these things happen, you could end up with a website full of internal affiliate links that no longer work. For example, after including your affiliate links throughout your blog for several years, if you get dropped from a company’s affiliate program, all of those links will be useless to you.
Another potential issue is if you no longer want to support a product or company. Your blog will be full of your affiliate network links and you’ll have to hunt them down and change all of them one by one.
Cloaking your affiliate links makes it easy to fix these issues fast. For example, say you published a link to a specific product 100 times on your blog. If you didn’t cloak that link, you’ll need to edit or replace that link in all 100 individual instances.
On the other hand, if you created a redirect to cloak that link, all you have to do is delete the old redirect and create a new redirect. It will only take a couple of minutes compared to all the time it would take to replace your links manually.
If you end up with dead affiliate links, with cloaking, you can redirect people to a similar product from another affiliate program or if you don’t have a replacement yet, you can redirect people back to your home page or to a special page about shampoo. The point is, you only have to change one redirect link, and not hundreds of affiliate links.
How to cloak your affiliate links
Cloaking your affiliate links is the best way to preserve your affiliate income and make sure you don’t lose commission on affiliate sales. If you’re using search engine optimization to promote your site and get it ranked in Google, cloaking your links will make it easy to fix some of the most common issues regarding affiliate links becoming inactive.
Here’s the simplest way to cloak your affiliate links:
Log into your website’s control panel and find the section that allows you to create redirects. Select a 302 redirect and redirect your full affiliate link to a short URL of your choice.
Generally, it’s ideal to use one short word for your redirects, as in the example of ‘www.yourdomain.com/shampoo’. Just make sure whatever path you choose doesn’t already exist with content otherwise people attempting to access that content will be redirected.
Affiliate links and content marketing are okay
Content marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies around. However, when you’re promoting content that contains affiliate product links, you have to think several steps into the future. Affiliate marketing programs can disappear, drop you from the program, or you might change your mind about who you wish to support.
The potential for affiliate links to change or become void is why you should:
- Cloak your internal links to affiliate products and
- Never publish your direct affiliate links on other websites. Instead, link to your landing pages – you won’t have control over changing those links if you need to in the future.
Remember affiliate marketing best practices
Now that you know the best way to link products you promote from your affiliate sites, it’s important to remember affiliate program best practices. Your affiliate marketing income will depend on your ability to implement your marketing efforts effectively throughout all marketing channels. Content marketing will bring you web traffic, but if you want more sales you need a strong affiliate marketing strategy.
The truth is, most successful affiliate marketers have been in the game for many years, some for decades. They have high-quality marketing tools and know which affiliate opportunities to pursue.
Affiliate campaigns are all different, but if you manage partnerships correctly, get a solid understanding of the affiliate marketing industry, build a good affiliate website, and choose the right affiliate program, you’ll have a good chance at being successful.
Tips to boost your affiliate marketing efforts
- Consider becoming a social media influencer. Have you thought about launching a YouTube channel to discuss or review affiliate products? Social media influencers can get some sweet deals from an affiliate partnership. Social media has become an inextricable component for affiliate marketing. You don’t have to use YouTube. Any social media platform will be a sufficient marketing platform.
- Join the Amazon affiliate program. You can earn affiliate income just by linking your visitors to products on Amazon. In terms of payout, it’s not the best affiliate program, but if you get plenty of website visitors it will help you earn money as an affiliate partner. You can even grab your affiliate link for products right from the top bar when you’re logged into your account.
- Join the eBay Partner Network. Like Amazon, eBay won’t bring you massive cash, but it’s popular among affiliate marketers because everyone is familiar with eBay and it’s easy to set up and earn money from commissions.
- Research the top affiliate programs. Some companies have the best affiliate programs, but you have to research to find them. Just remember that affiliate programs work when you put in the time and effort.
- Document your account information. For each company you promote, document information like your login, affiliate ID, and a direct link to your affiliate dashboard. This will make it easy to reference later.
- Create an affiliate website. Most of the time, successful affiliate marketing sites are review sites. You can market your affiliate site with little or no money, depending on how you run your marketing campaigns.
- Focus your affiliate marketing business. If you’re going to run an eCommerce business that relies on affiliate marketing, you need to stay focused and not spread yourself thin. Commit to one company at a time and build some affiliate marketing success with a small number of products first. Then, branch out to more products and additional affiliate marketing programs.
- Use email marketing. Email marketing tools will help you generate more sales from your affiliate marketing programs. One way you can use email is to offer exclusive access to your subscribers before you announce a new product on your website.
- Be selective with affiliate marketing products. It’s ideal if you genuinely support the products you promote through personal experience. However, if you can’t test all the products you promote, choose your affiliate marketing partners carefully to make sure they have a good reputation.
- Test your referral link. For each product you promote, make sure you test your own affiliate link periodically to ensure it’s working. However, if there’s ever a chance you might buy from the company, be sure to test your links in a browser you never use (if you don’t want to delete your cookies in your usual browser). You don’t want to be dismissed by an affiliate program for buying from your own link.
- Seek online marketing tips from experts. An affiliate marketer who knows how to get results will be partnered with the top affiliate programs. If you’re trying to find out what the best affiliate programs are, follow in their footsteps. Find their blogs and see what they’re selling and how they’re marketing their business.
- Know how to spot a good affiliate marketing program. There’s a difference between a good and bad affiliate marketing program, but it’s not always obvious. However, generally speaking, a good affiliate system will allow you to create a unique affiliate link for every product individually so that you’re not stuck sending everyone to the home page to fend for themselves.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn cash
If you haven’t already, it’s not too late to start affiliate marketing. A good affiliate marketing program will make sure you have all the tools you need to succeed with their affiliate program. You’ll have to do your own marketing, but you’ll have everything you need to get started.
In conclusion
Affiliate links aren’t a great SEO strategy by themselves, since they pass no authority onto your site, but they can be useful in terms of generating raw traffic to your pages. If you’re going to use affiliate links as part of your overall lead generation strategy, applying these steps can help you make the most of them. You generally don’t have to worry about the threat of a penalty, since Google understands and condones the use of affiliate links, but don’t pass up the opportunity for a little extra SEO power.
He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.
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